


the nature of scars and souls

by occasionally_always



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Episode: e081 A Guest for Mr. Spider (The Magnus Archives), Episode: e181 Ignorance (The Magnus Archives), Jon's perspective as well as Annabelle Cane's, The Web - Freeform, oh they're exactly 100 apart that's fun, the significance of the Upton House stop, which is only implied, which relates to the significance of Martin Blackwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26768662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/occasionally_always/pseuds/occasionally_always
Summary: Jon knows the significance of what he’s doing when he raises his hand and knock, knock, knocks on the door to Upton House. He knows the irony of the situation; he knows that this parallel is inevitably more than coincidence. He knows that he is deluding himself by imagining that three knocks instead of two will make it any different.Or; it all started with a mark, and it will continue a different sort, but a mark nonetheless.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 6
Kudos: 43





	the nature of scars and souls

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: mentions of Mr. Spider, manipulation, traumatic experiences, and the dissociation at Upton House; Jon being referred to as "it" once at the end.

Jon knows the significance of what he’s doing when he raises his hand and  _ knock, knock, knocks _ on the door to Upton House. He knows the irony of the situation; he knows that this parallel is inevitably more than coincidence. He knows that he is deluding himself by imagining that three knocks instead of two will make it any different.

He doesn’t  _ Know _ , but he doesn’t need to. No supernatural knowledge was needed when he followed Thomas Reid up to Mr. Spider’s door, when he watched as the teenager knocked twice on the door, when he  _ knew _ deep in his gut that he would never see Thomas again. No supernatural knowledge is needed now.

The door opens, and for a moment he is so relieved that he isn’t being pulled in by black, spindly legs that he doesn’t register the person who opened it. But she is a spider too, in her own way; her smile is human, but cobwebs choke the space beneath her skin and he cannot look away from where they shimmer in the side of her head.

Their time at Upton House was brief, but not insignificant, and yet Jon hardly remembers it at all. It’s not as though there’s simply a  _ blank _ in his memory; rather, it all feels dream-like, his consciousness two feet to the left of his body, and he cannot grasp the specifics of what was done and said. The clearest part of it all is the feel of the hard wooden door beneath his hand as he knocked; the second-clearest is the way Annabelle’s gossamer strands of cobweb caught the light when she turned.

Martin is sending him worried glances every few seconds, but Jon can’t find a smile inside himself to respond with; his emotions are too chaotic and overwhelming, between the guilt of dragging Martin away from that sanctuary and the relief of fear and knowledge washing over him in harmony yet again.

“I love you,” Martin says suddenly, as they walk with feet already weary, and hands clasped tight to ground themselves against the subtle vertigo of the domain they’re leaving behind, the first one they’ve passed through since Salesa’s...place. The routine of finding a domain, taking its statement, and moving on didn’t take long to fall back into.

“I know,” Jon says tiredly, not yet saying  _ I love you _ in return, instead contemplating the twisted logic in his head that tells him he doesn’t deserve to be loved and so giving Martin any love back will only encourage the sure toxicity of this relationship. He ultimately discards this notion, because a long time ago, he made the choice to trust Martin, and he trusts him now to know when something isn’t good for him. (To set boundaries at the least; to make the decisions Jon is too selfish to make.) “I love you too.”

“I love you,” Martin continues, and Jon has a sudden moment of  _ uh-oh _ before the inevitable “but” comes.

“But we need to be able to communicate,” finishes Martin firmly, and Jon pauses in their steady tread to look up at him.

“I thought we were,” he says, biting back the more snippy response that stress is allowing to form inside of him— _ I thought you didn’t  _ want _ me to know what goes on in your head _ .

“Annabelle is  _ dangerous _ , Jon. I know you weren’t in a right state of mind when—well—in that place, but I tried to tell you I didn’t like it there, and you just went along with her.”

“I’m not sure we could have avoided anything that Annabelle Cane didn’t want us to avoid.”

“Then  _ say _ that. Talk it out with me. Don’t just—don’t just waltz right in and expect me to follow!”

“I-I’m sorry,” Jon stammers, taken aback. “I didn’t realize you felt that way.”

Martin looks as though he’s about to say something in return, but stops and exhales instead. They resume their progress forward, Jon glancing down at their still-entwined hands with a vague sense of uncertainty.

He hates this. He hates not being able to understand Martin. Knowing is something that comes to him on instinct, now, and it would be  _ so easy _ just to—

But no. Martin set a boundary. And Jon trusts Martin.

It’s just that Jon isn’t used to blind spots.

Upton House severed the connection between him and the Eye, and all he was left with was his own humanity. As it turned out, that didn’t do him much good. The haze he was in didn’t feel wrong at all, but that scares him when he thinks about it. And Martin is another source of uncertainty, another piece of this world that lacks the clarity that Jon is so used to, that Jon  _ thrives _ on.

He doesn't know what all of this adds up to; he only knows that it leaves him with a disorienting mix of emotions. Humanity is good, but lack of knowledge feels bad. Martin is good, but humanity feels bad. Things are good, but Jon feels bad.

“Do you really think she’s controlling everything?” Martin asks suddenly, interrupting the relative silence they had been walking in. “Pulling the strings?”

“Annabelle? She might be controlling nothing at all. Letting people think and wonder about how in control they really are is more the Web’s type of manipulation than, well, actuall manipulation.” Jon takes a breath. “But I don’t think I knocked on that door solely because it was what I wanted to do.”

“Well, I made the decision with you,” Martin points out.

“Oh—yes, I—because it was what  _ we _ wanted to do,” Jon amends hurriedly, but that’s not what he meant at all.

“You think it’s about you,” Martin says, and he says it as a statement and not a question, but Jon knows him well enough to know he means it as a question and not a statement. He also knows not to take it as Martin calling him self-centered (even though that might not be inaccurate—he really hasn’t been allowing Martin as much consideration as he should have been).

“I don’t know,” he says, slowly, the words coming out with much more weight than he had felt in his last  _ I don’t know _ , a week ago, when he was faced with the prospect of a mystery about to be discovered.  _ This _ mystery might never be solved, and that tears at him, leaving great gashes in the part of him that had faded so quickly when at Upton House and is now nestled back in its collection of knowledge that is  _ so frustratingly close _ to infinite. “I…”

_ It’s just that the spiders are where it started _ , he wants to say.

He keeps his mouth closed and wonders if this is because there are gossamer strands pulling his lips tight together (or if he’s deluding himself worse than when the Not Sasha was around).

Thomas Reid is eighteen and a half years old when he is taken beyond a remarkably normal-looking door. Jonathan Sims is eight and three-quarters when he watches this happen. Doesn’t do anything. Just watches.

(It leaves a mark on him, a mark of fear. Before he goes to bed at night, he looks through his stack of bedside books to make sure  _ A Guest For Mr. Spider _ hasn’t somehow magically slipped itself in when he wasn’t looking. When he wakes up in the morning, he pinches himself to rid the lingering, dream-image of blood-stained wood from his head. He makes his grandmother remove or kill any spiders he sees in the house when she’s there, and throws things at them in a panic when she’s not.

It leaves a mark on him, a mark of monstrosity. A seed, deep in his mind, shrouded in his first taste of deep fear. A metaphysical tattoo that gets him the position of Head Archivist and the prison of The Archive. A step onto a path that twists and turns and leaves him bloodied and torn by the time he finally reaches the end.)

(Sometimes he’s certain he did it all to himself; others, he spirals into questioning how many of his actions were orchestrated by Elias, or by the Web, or by some other factor he isn’t even aware of. This doubt can only be feeding the Web, and may even be caused by it, but the idea of doubting the reason behind his doubt of the reason behind—well, you get the picture; essentially, he tries to avoid thinking about it too much.)

Martin Blackwood is thirty-two and a quarter years old when his eldritch boyfriend knocks on a remarkably normal-looking door. Jonathan Sims is thirty-two and a half when he does the knocking. Doesn’t think about it. Just knocks.

(And for just under a week, he is overwhelmingly, underwhelmingly human. He is ignorant and hazy and supernaturally blind. He talks to the antiques dealer that has found a way to live in the midst of an apocalypse, and wonders about the spider that has surely built a web in this sanctuary. Maybe the sanctuary  _ is _ the web. Maybe he has already been caught. Maybe spiderwebs have stuck to his skin and torn off his wings and he hasn’t even noticed.

And then they leave, and he’s back to watching.)

Annabelle wonders if Jonah Magnus can see Jon, in the depths of his fancy tower, in the heart of what used to be London. She rather thinks he can’t; the Eye has never been very capable of looking at itself, she thinks.

She wonders how he would react if he  _ could _ see his creation. He must be proud of how monstrous his Archivist has become, perhaps even jealous. Jon’s bond to the Eye is so much  _ more _ than his, Jon’s connection to the entities so much deeper.

And Upton House—would he be surprised if he knew that Mikaele Salesa and his camera were the source of that particular blind spot? Would he be concerned that Jon had spent time there? Would he find Martin Blackwood’s part in it all as useful as Annabelle is?

She doesn’t know, and to be honest, she could be more bothered by this fact. She’s not desperate to tug the answers out of whatever corner they’re hiding in; Annabelle is content enough to watch from the side as things play out. How interesting, that the absence of curiosity makes her so different from Jon, and yet the role of the watcher is so similar.

She finds it quite satisfying that she gets this role when it comes to Jon, while Jonah can see and know nothing about the being he so carefully cultivated, marking terror into every fiber of its being.

She wonders, still, what he would think if he could see the way humanity was driven into his Archive at Upton House, how he would feel if he knew it was a mark she had given Jon herself.


End file.
